steveb - 3:49 am on Jan 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's not admitting they can't fix it to recognize the Internet is not stuck in the 20th century. In the future thay may be all sorts of ways to interactively insert text into webpages. How the engines view such text needn't and shouldn't be governed by or viewed in the context of archaic principles (meaning principles from more than a couple years ago).

Something new came along. Some new way to handle it came along. The reality is that user-inserted links on a page are different than owner-inserted links. Most folks already knew that. The engine's algorithms were intended to be built around valuing owner inserted links, so this change really makes no statement on the algorithms. It merely makes a statement that the engines were staggeringly slow in implementing an obvious step.